Breakup Of The Soviet Union An

In one week, the summer of 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, became history. The forces of reform unleashed by President Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid 1980’s generated a democratic movement. “Mr. Gorbachev may be revered for the democratic forces he unleashed- his policies of perestroika, or reconstructing, and glasnost, or openness. However, his failure to put food on Soviet tables and his reluctance to move boldly on economic reforms doomed him to be a failure” (Sieff). His economic policies threw his country into even more turmoil and chaos, as the different nationalities used their new freedoms to move away from the union. “Gorbachev sincerely wanted ...

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of the Twenty- Seventh Party Congress in 1986, perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “economic, political, and social reconstructing, became the unintended catalyst for dismantling what had taken nearly three- quarters of a century to erect” (Perestroika). Conservatives have called it as a “public effort to subtly seduce the Western world to lower its guard” (Corpus), believing it was a disguise just to distract foreign nations. Liberals believe it that it is a “mandate for disarmament and cooperation between two extremely different value systems while under the death threat of nuclear war” (Corpus). However, Gorbachev declares that it is a “union of principals and socialism and not a response to a poor domestic economy or wholesale abandonment of basic communist tenets” (Corpus). Furthermore, he asserts that perestroika is a “blueprint for the Soviet Union to emerge from the economic backwardness into global ...

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towards values and high standards” (Rodrigue). However, Gorbachev’s solutions are flawed because of the “lack of an ethical framework to guide his programs” (The Collapse of Stalinism). He did not “have a clear plan of what kind of political and social system must be created,” says Fydor Bulatsky, a speechwriter for Krushchev, close aide of Andropov, and former advisor to Gorbachev (Sneider). Perestroika has focused on “three planes, three trends, three directions of problem. First is the struggle for priority either ideology or of common sense, second is a struggle for supremacy either of the party or of the state, and third is the struggle ...

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